Selfish routing with atomic players

  • Authors:
  • Tim Roughgarden

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA

  • Venue:
  • SODA '05 Proceedings of the sixteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

One of the most successful applications of the price of anarchy---the worst-case ratio between the objective function values of noncooperative equilibria and optima---is to "selfish routing", a classical model of how independent network users route traffic in a congested network. However, almost all existing work on this topic (e.g., [2, 5, 7]) assumes a large population of very small network users, so that the actions of a single individual have negligible impact on the cost incurred by others. This assumption---in game theory terminology, that the game is nonatomic---is obviously not justifiable in all applications.